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Business rules and tour operator yield management with Rezgo 6

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One of the most powerful features of Rezgo is undoubtedly the Rules.  With the rules engine, you can manage availability, pricing, cut-offs, group restrictions, and even create promotional codes.  One of the issues with a feature like this though is that it can be a real challenge to make it easy for tour operators to understand and use.  With Rezgo 6, we’ve completely revamped the interface for rules in order to make them easier to create and more powerful.

IF… THEN…

The core of the rules engine is the concept of IF certain criteria are met, THEN trigger this action.  Currently, this means having to select from a variety of criteria and then selecting a variety of outcomes.  The issue is that even though that’s how the system works, it isn’t really clear. With Rezgo 6, you select specific IF criteria when you create your rule.  Once you are happy with your criteria, you select the actions that are THEN triggered by the rule.

if-then-rulesYou can choose from a variety of criteria that will trigger your rule. For example, you can choose to trigger a rule based on the booking date or today’s date, the day of the week, the number of passengers, a promo code, or inventory items.

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Once you have selected your triggering criteria, you can tell the rule to take certain action.  These actions might include changing availability, changing prices, or even changing the cutoff of a tour.

True tour operator yield management

With rules you can change your pricing and availability based on any number of criteria and have these changes occur automatically throughout the year.  For example, if you are a seasonal business that has a fairly defined high, low, and shoulder seasons, you can define pricing and availability rules that take advantage of these peaks and valleys in order to maximize your profits.  During your busy season, you can automatically adjust your pricing up and in the low season adjust your pricing down.  Do you have days that are busy than others?  You can even adjust your pricing automatically based on the day of the week.  Set your weekend pricing higher in order to take advantage of greater demand.  The beauty of rules is that you can set these pricing adjustments at the beginning of the year and they will automatically take effect based on the dates you specify in the rules.  There is no need to worry about whether or not the system is offering the right price.  Once you create your rules, you can sit back and relax as the system makes the adjustments for you.

One inventory item but many rules

The problem with many basic booking tools or scheduling software is that they rely on a calendar approach to set availability.  This usually means that when a tour or activity is scheduled for a year, the system actually creates 365 individual instances of the tour in the calendar.  This can make adjusting pricing and availability across multiple days very challenging.  With Rezgo, you create a single instance of your tour or activity and then use rules define when and how the tour or activity is available or priced.  If you decide to make a change or adjust a date range, the rules will automatically adjust the tour or activity in real-time.  This means that you can have multiple pricing and availability rules affecting the same inventory item at the same time.

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Although this may seem like it might be difficult to visualize, let along manage, Rezgo 6 has a handy availability view that allows you to see all the rules that are affecting your tour or activity on any given day.  True tour operator yield management combined with granular availability control, available only with Rezgo 6.



 
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